Category Archives: The Matrix

I had an interesting experience this weekend with a man I used to do peer counseling with almost ten years ago. The guy’s wife had heard I’d moved back to northern Nevada and asked if I’d spend some time with him as he’s been suffering from cancer, and honestly, he’s in death’s waiting room. He’s late 70s now but when I first started counseling the guy at university he was one of the tougher men I knew in trying to expose to what’s now the Red Pill.

He’s never really accepted the fundamental truths and for literally his entire life he’s been struggling with the frustration that Blue Pill men all do when they simply don’t understand that the set of books they believe women – particularly older women from his generation – should be playing fair by. It was particularly disheartening to listen to him still complain about his wife’s lack of sexual interest in him.

For her part she’d completely checked out of anything intimate with him beyond the perfunctory duties of being civil with her husband years ago. As his illness has progressed he’s become less mobile and more resentful of her indifference to him. From my perspective, coming back into this story after almost ten years, it struck me how a Blue Pill conditioning solidifies into a man’s life in his later years. Revealing the Red Pill truths as to what’s brought him to where he is now is almost too cruel to torture him with, and honestly he wouldn’t accept it.

I’ve always advocated that unplugging men from the Matrix is like triage, save the men you can, read last rites to the dying. For those who don’t come to terms with the Red Pill and the true nature of the realities of the sexual marketplace at least there’s some hope that eventually they will experience something similar to what the Red Pill defines for them and they’ll have pause and insight to reconsider those truths. That’s the bitter taste of the Red Pill – there’s no going back once you start to see the behaviors and relate them to Red Pill principles.

I read guys on the TRP subreddit forum who are newly unplugged who really have a tough time coming to terms with that new reality. They get pissed off, they want to cling to the “it’s not really that bad” or “not all women are like that” conditioning and throw their hands up in disgust with the Red Pill and move on.

Only they can’t. Four months later they come back to the forum after having a woman behave exactly as the theories predicted they would. There’s a manosphere saying that women hate the Red Pill because it more reliably and accurately predicts human behavior than feminism ever has. That Red Pill awareness and predictability is tough to shake for guys who want to go back to the comfort of believing there’s still hope for them in a Blue Pill world.

This Old Man

I realize this is going to get depressing here, but it’s important to consider the totality of what a lifetime of Blue Pill ignorance represents to a man at his end. There are going to be men who will never accept Red Pill truths. They will never make the connection that the rule book they think everyone is working from is a plan with the intent of consuming him all the way to his death-bed. For whatever reason anything counter to their preconception of how women and men ought to relate to one another simply doesn’t register for them.

I’ll continue with my story about this man, but before I do I think that for anyone to have a complete understanding of how what we call Red Pill awareness affects our lives as men we need to consider how that awareness plays out across the span of our lives. Red Pill awareness, what I call positive masculinity, and the counter to a social order founded on the Feminine Imperative is still in its infancy. Some guys want to characterize it as a return to what was once conventional masculine ideals, and while I think that has some merit things simply aren’t going back to what men romanticize they were with women.

In the ‘sphere there’s a particular focus on how men can get the desired results they want in their personal and intimate lives by applying what Red Pill awareness helps them to reasonably predict. That’s fine for PUAs, maybe MGTOWs, and in the meantime MRAs will channel the parts of the Red Pill they do accept to increase awareness of men’s issues. But all of these branches and all of their interests are applied in the now.

My father died from complications of Alzheimers in 2010. My brother and I had him provided for in an assisted living facility for the last year of his life and it got to the point he couldn’t recognize either of us or his grandchildren. It was very difficult to watch my Dad who was a brilliant man, but a life long Beta, decay to a shell of himself. However even while suffering from memory loss, he was still clinging to the behaviors his Blue Pill conditioning taught him would make him appreciated by the other women in the facility.

My Dad taught me the meaning of the Savior Schema throughout most of his life – if that post seems poignant to you it’s because I learned it well from my old man. His ‘dating’ methodology was always based around a strategy of what he could do to better solve, buy or otherwise alleviate the problems a woman had in the hopes that a reciprocated appreciation of it would result in intimacy. The old set of books, he had them memorized.

I mention this because even with his mind addled by dementia some part of his subconscious still expected old women, women he had no idea what their names were, to reciprocate their love and intimacy for doing their gardening or fixing something for them. He couldn’t remember my name, but he could remember being slighted by women not giving him a kiss or patting him on the back ‘for all he did for them.’

This is just one example of the extent and consequences of Blue Pill conditioning. Using Red Pill / Game to pick up or live a better life with women, or extending that awareness to other aspects of one’s life is commendable and a betterment to a man’s life, but appreciating that betterment is incomplete without acknowledging the consequences of what a Blue Pill life path looks like.

When I agreed to spending most of my day with this man I had a kind of idealistic want to create a memorable time for him. He’s still pretty together mentally, but physically the guy can’t walk for more than 30 yards without getting winded. I took him out to the casinos, he hung out with me and some of the guys I snowmobile with, we drank good bourbon and I had hoped he’d get out of this self-pity by just doing something different for him.

He wouldn’t have it. All he could talk about was his resentment of his wife’s treatment of him “after all he’d done for her over the years”. He’ll be gone inside a year or two and he complains about Blue Pill frustrations as if there’s a chance he might live a better life in the future.

Last April I lost one of my most prized greyhounds to osteosarcoma. He was only 8 years old so it was kind of tragic, but I’d had him x-rayed and caught the signs early enough to manage his pain for an extra month before the pain was too much for him. Literally the day I had him put down, to the hour before, he insisted on going outside to walk in the grass and breath the air, he leaned on me like greys do, but it was an acknowledgement of him knowing it was his time. That dog took the last train home with more dignity and self-awareness than this man will.

I’m not a big fan of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, but I do accept his concept of having ‘peak experiences’. I think there is a Blue Pill presumption that those peaks are only peaks if they include their ONEitis girlfriend or wife along there to experience it with them. This is a tragedy because it disqualifies those fantastic life experiences (even stressful ones) because that Beta want of a mutually shared love precedes the capacity to recognize those great peaks.

It is important from a larger meta-life experience to understand just what the implications of a Blue Pill existence are and rise above them. Red Pill awareness isn’t just about getting better and hotter women, it’s about living a better life – when you’re 22 and 92.

Even for the most abject Beta man there comes significant points in his life when he makes a Red Pill connection – a point at which, despite his feminine-primary socialization and for all his own participation in a system that deceives him, his circumstance or a trauma rattles him into a state of clarity.

As I wind my way through the Preventive Medicine timeline in the second draft of the next book I come to understand the periods at which these moments of clarity most commonly occur for Beta men.

Early in life that prompt may be the sting of having a high school sweetheart break up with him before she goes off to college. In or after college it might be the undoing of a long distance relationship he thought for sure his soul-mate would help him dutifully preserve. Later it maybe the realization of how much of his personal potential he truly lost after investing so much in a wife who divorced him and separated him from his children.

Not all of these events are as traumatic as this, but it’s during these Red Pill moments of clarity a man begins to see a hint of the code in the Matrix; a suspicion that maybe what he’s believed about how intergender relations should be really haven’t been directed toward his best interest.

So it was with a certain amount of interest I took notice of a man named Stephen when he petitioned advice from a mouthpiece of the Feminine Imperative this week. Though he doesn’t yet realize it, Stephen is at a Red Pill moment of clarity in his life, and as most Beta men are won’t to do, he seeks answers from the same feminine-primary trough that’s kept him in a state of patient stasis until his yet unrealized potential has now become useful to the Feminine Imperative.

Rather than simply allow the feminine crabs drag him back down into the barrel (until his next Red Pill moment of clarity), I’m going to re-post his plea for understanding here and give him (with the help of my esteemed commenters) the Red Pill truth he deserves at so critical a juncture in his life.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my college dating experiences. I’m 28 years old now and I’ve noticed a very odd phenomenon lately. I’m getting noticed (and approached) by women that never would’ve given me the time of day when I was in college. Successful, accomplished women! One in particular is incredibly hot, but they all are attractive. I am baffled by this. You may laugh, but this is making me extremely frustrated and stressed out.

Reading your blog has offered some explanations. I’m an analytical guy, so I’ve been very impressed with the social science you weave into your writing, and the research about how 28 is the ideal male age for women helped to explain what might be going on. But I still can’t figure out what’s going on, with me or with them. I feel emotions like resentment and suspicion, as well as desire, but I’m not at all flattered. I find myself unable to respond in any way, positively or negatively. I feel paralyzed.

Sometimes I think I’m just offended. These are the very same women who rejected me time and again in college. I mean, I know they’re not the same but…they’re the same. I wanted relationships (I tried casual sex…EPIC FAIL), they didn’t want me. My one serious college girlfriend cheated on me with her professor. I was really, really hurt, felt like a chump, etc. To put it in a HUS context, the [college girls] preferred alpha males (I’m definitely a beta, introverted, overly intense, with a baby face.) Or maybe they were reluctant to get involved during college because they wanted to be free to move on after graduation and not be tied down.

The thing is, I don’t think I’ve changed all that much. Frankly, I couldn’t change if I wanted to, even if it meant getting these women. I may have come out of my shell a little, but I honestly don’t think it’s me that’s different. It’s them, and I don’t think I like the difference. I think I’m the consolation prize. I think they still want the alphas but they’ve given up. Time to settle. I’m offended. I don’t trust these women.

Am I too proud? Getting my revenge? Guarded from past humiliations? Or have I just grown up and learned from my experiences?

Stephen

Stephen, the moment of Red Pill clarity you’re now experiencing is coming from your newly realized status. The women you describe being attracted to you (different than being aroused by you) are entering what I call The Epiphany Phase – the point at which their sexual market value begins to decay in earnest while a man’s begins his greatest potential to capitalize upon his own SMV as it steadily (should) increase.

This is a precarious time for women, usually the years between 28 and 30, where she makes attempts to reassess the last decade of her life. Women’s psychological rationalization engine (a.k.a. the Hamster) begins a furious effort to account for, and explain her reasonings for not having successfully secured a long term monogamous commitment from as Alpha a man as her attractiveness could attain for her. Even women married prior to this phase will go through some variation of self-doubt, or self-pity in dealing with the hypergamic uncertainty of her choice of husband (“Is he really the best I could do?”)

It’s during this stage that women will make radical shifts in the prioritization of what prerequisite traits qualify as ‘attractive’ in a man and attempt to turn over a new leaf by changing up their behaviors to align with this new persona they create for themselves. Since the physicality, sexual prowess and Alpha dominance that made up her former arousal cues in a Man aren’t as forthcoming from men as when she was in her sexual prime, she reprioritizes them with (presumed) preferences for more intrinsic male attributes that stress dependability, provisioning capacity, humor, intellect, and esoteric definitions of compatibility and intimacy.

Where you find yourself now, Stephen, is in the midst of these women coming to terms with their waning SMV and the increasing effort it takes women of that age bracket to effectively compete in a sexual marketplace where younger women simply outclass them with every new year that she doesn’t consolidate on a man who represents a good long term provisioning prospect.

As you suggest, these are the same women who found you sexually invisible when they were younger and enjoying the same SMV peak with the relatively more Alpha men they wanted to have short term sexual experiences with. These women were the younger competition they now find threatening their sexual selection today.

Are they exactly the same individual women? I don’t know for sure from your outline, but even if they aren’t, the Schedules of Mating script women follow is so common and predictable that they may as well effectively be the same women to you – and this is precisely what your subconscious instinct is attempting to relate to your conscious-self now.

Unless you’ve made a drastic improvement to your physical appearance or you’ve become more Game aware and have changed your intersexual outlook and behavior the obvious answer is, it is these women who’ve changed.

Now the question remains, why?

What has changed in these women’s lives that prompted this dramatic shift in how they’ve re-prioritized what they now find sexually acceptable? What is it about you in the now (and not back then) that makes you ideal for that acceptability?

Aunt Giggles wants to convince you to let bygones be bygones and follow along with the script the Feminine Imperative expects of you by shaming you for not forgiving a woman of her past indiscretions…

No doubt the girls at college rewarded the males who were early developers and exhibited masculine qualities then. Why take that personally?

I’ll tell you why, because the men they were interested in short term sexual prospects with then weren’t being asked to make anything resembling the life changing personal investment in these ‘reformed’ women she hopes you’ll man-up and be a ‘Better Beta’ for. Those men got the milk for free because the cow milked herself and gave it to them, gladly.

Now that’s a hell of a proposition for a guy who’s played by what his prior feminine conditioning would have him believe were the ‘rules’ for as long as you have. Is it really that far a stretch to want to protect the investment of your personal potential, not to mention your yet unrealized peak SMV potential, with women who now hope you’ll be sex, love and desire starved enough for the past 10 or so years to look past all the short term sex they had with more Alpha men in the Party Years of their early to mid 20s?

Maturation of Beta Bucks

Aunt Sue has always ridden the fence when it comes to acknowledging the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks nature of women’s sexual strategy. When it suits her narrative she agrees with Hypergamy, when it doesn’t, well, you’ll never know because those posts get scrubbed from her blog.

Fortunately you don’t need her input on Hypergamy to understand women’s pluralistic sexual strategy – there are many, much higher profile women than Susan Walsh who openly and publicly endorse exactly the strategy these women (who are suddenly attracted to you now) are using:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

Whether he’s the one that got away, the office husband, or a gym partner, chances are he is the “Plan B” man you fantasize about running away with. Like an insurance policy, this man is the handpicked boyfriend or husband replacement you have on standby once “plan A” starts to break down on you. According to a survey conducted by OnePoll.com, an online market research company, half of women who are married or in relationships have a Plan B man on standby who is “ready and waiting” because of “unfinished business.”

You see Stephen, it’s not those “Red Pill, Dark Triad cads” who perpetuate the “Beta Bux” theory; we don’t need to, it’s modern women who proudly, triumphantly, openly confirm their own Hypergamy and blatantly expect you to comply with it by default. In fact they’ll shame you, as all the commenters on HUS are doing now, for even questioning your expected role in affirming their sexual strategy.

So, with the knowledge of this new Red Pill truth, openly confirmed by the very same women who are ‘attracted’ to you now, how do you intend to benefit from it? Will you stick your head back in the blue pill sand of HUS, or will you become curious about the broader truths of the Red Pill. Just remember, now you’re aware of a Red Pill truth, there’s no going back.

However, bear in mind, you’re 28, the women you’re dealing with now have had a lot longer than just the 4 years they may have spent in high school to decide if you were attractive to them – these women have had the better part of the past 10 years and the benefit of experiencing the peak of their SMV potential up to this point in life.

Aunt Giggles’ would have you believe your new found SMV is the result some maturation process or change in your personal conditions when in fact it’s the very calculated result of an proudly confirmed, pre-designed sexual strategy. And it becomes really insidious when the operative feminine social convention in play accuses you of wanting “revenge” for acknowledging the same strategy that these women do openly already; you could be cowed into the fear of remaining alone, but that’s a myth to bust in another post.

Commenters, perhaps I’ve missed something here.

Please, feel free to post your advice for Stephen in the always open, never moderated and entirely uncensored comment section only here at The Rational Male.

I realize I dropped this quote last week, but it provides us with a unique illustration of the prevailing feminine psychology that’s been evolving since the sexual revolution.

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

In last week’s post I made note that Sheryl Sandberg was blissfully ignorant of her blatant admission of feminine hypergamy, but I felt her ‘advice’ to women here represented so much more than just a display of her solipsistic ignorance.

For as long as I’ve butted heads with many obstinate deniers of hypergamy’s influences, on women personally and society on whole, I’m not sure I’ve read a more damning indictment of hypergamy from a more influential woman. Sandberg’s advice to the next generation of women essentially puts the lie to, and exposes the uncomfortable truth about, women’s efforts deny the fundamental dynamic of female sexual strategy – Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks.

Even if you want to argue the evolutionary (psychology) and biological origins of women’s pluralistic sexual strategy, the fact is now socially evident; women have come to a point where they’re comfortable in openly admitting the truth that Red Pill awareness has been drawing attention to for over a decade now.

Courtesy of Sheryl Sandberg, the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks basis of women’s sexual pluralism is now publicly recognized. It’s kind of ironic considering that what the manosphere has been trying to make men aware of for years is now being co-opted, embraced and owned as if women had always practiced an open sexual pluralism – incredulous to any man’s shock over it.

However, the truth is that a feminine-centric social order can no longer hide the increasingly obvious fallout and consequences of a society restructured to accommodate women as the predominant sexual interest.

Last week I speculated that Sandberg was ignorant of the feminine-primary implications that her statements draw attention to – and I’m still of the opinion that an innate feminine solipsism motivates more and more women to this admission – but it’s impossible to ignore the new degree of comfort in which women feel in laying bare their dualistic sexual strategy.

To some significant extent the Feminine Imperative no longer needs to keep the ‘Good Genes’ / ‘Good Dad’ dichotomy ugliness a secret from men.

In last week’s post I mentioned that a new ambient sense of an assured long-term security in the feminine mind was predisposing women to prioritize the ‘Best Genes’ (Alpha Fucks) side of feminine hypergamy. Sandberg’s ‘advice’ is a vital confirmation of this, however, she tacitly acknowledges a window of opportunity during which women possess a better capacity to pursue this side of hypergamy:

The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner.

In these two sentences Sheryl (and by extensions the Feminine Imperative) essentially confirms women’s pluralistic sexual strategy, my (now infamous) sexual market value graph depicting women’s peak SMV and decay, and the first half of the time line of women’s phases of maturity I laid forth in the first two installments of the Preventative Medicine series.

Selling the Beta

With regards to men, I believe the most salient part of Sandberg’s admission is found at the end:

These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.

For the better half of the time since the sexual revolution it was necessary for the Feminine Imperative to convince a majority of men that their eventual Beta providership for women was not only their duty, but also a prime aspect of feminine attraction. As I mentioned last week, under the (pre-sexual revolution) old-order attraction model this may have been the case to a large degree. However after the revolution, and as women’s hypergamy prioritized towards ‘Good Genes’ short-term sexual partners, the ‘Good Dad’ (Beta Bucks) men needed an ever increasing ‘sell’ of their own attractiveness by women.

This persistent sell was a necessary element of ensuring a future long-term security for women while pursuing increasingly more short-term breeding opportunities as feminine-primacy expanded into society. The future ‘Good Dads’ would need to be patiently waiting out women’s “indiscretion years” during their SMV peak, so the sell became an ever-evolving definition of what women found attractive in men based on that old-order model of dependability, patience, industriousness, and every other characteristic that defined a good provider.

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The most straightforward prediction that follows is that women seeking short-term mates, when the man’s only contribution to offspring is genetic, should prefer muscularity more than women seeking long-term mates.

Strategic pluralism theory is a pretty good definition of feminine hypergamy, but what this theory hadn’t yet accounted for (at the time it was published) was the necessitousness of women with regards to short-term mating strategies and long-term parental investment opportunities over the course of the various phases of maturity as they aged.

The Beta investment sell was necessary because it ensured male parental investment at a later (usually just-pre-Wall) time in a woman’s life. Thus, Sandberg’s praise of men “who think women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. [Men] who value fairness and expect or, even better, want to do his share in the home” will eventually be sexier than the Alpha “bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys” she encourages women to fuck earlier in life is an excellent example of this sell.

Ironically it’s exactly with this sell that women encourage the very transactional nature of sexual relations with men they’re screeching about recently. It’s the Choreplay fallacy on a meta scale – do more around the house, play into the equalitarian schema women think they need in a provider, support her ambitiousness and opinionatedness and you’ll be considered “sexier” and get her Best Sex she’s been saving just for a guy like this.

Building the Beta

The problem the Feminine Imperative runs into with selling the Beta is that as women’s “independence” expands this sell becomes less necessary and less effective. Less necessary because women’s personal, social and legal long-term security insurances have become almost entirely disconnected from men’s direct (not indirect) provisioning. Less effective because men have become increasingly aware of their disenfranchisement of the old-order provisioning model as being something they might equitably be rewarded for.

As the consequences and repercussions of women’s hypergamous priority shift to Alpha Fucks become more evident and real for men; and as their capacity and comfort with connecting and relating these experiences with other men becomes more widespread, the less effective the sell is for Beta men awaiting their turn to enter into a pre or post Wall monogamy with the women attempting the sell.

Throughout the 70’s, 80’s and most of the 90’s, the sell was effective because men were isolated socially and technologically from each other’s relative experiences. From the late 90’s onward that isolation has diminished while the societal results of feminine-primacy have become more glaringly, and painfully, evident to men.

In its ever-reinventive fluidity, the Feminine Imperative found it necessary to transition from selling men on being later and later life long-term providers for women into building a generation of men who would expect of themselves to fulfill that role when the time came. These men would be raised and conditioned to be the patient Beta providers women would need once they had followed the Sandberg model of hypergamy.

These would be the boys / men who would be taught to “naturally” defer to the authority of women under the auspices of a desire to be an equal partner.

These are the men raised privately and created socially to be ready for women, “when it comes time to settle down, and find someone who wants an equal partner.”

These would be the men ready to expect and accept a woman’s proactive cuckoldry of him in the name of being a pro-feminine equal.

These are the men raised to accept an open form of hypergamy in place of the selling to an old-order Beta provisioning model.

The Hypergamy Schism

The problem this creates for women becomes one of dealing with the men they need to sell a secretive hypergamy to and the men they build to accept an open form of hypergamy to. The increasing comfort with an open admission of hypergamy is relative to a woman’s capacity to get away with it.

A woman like Sheryl Sandberg has the means to decisively ensure her future independence and long-term security (at least in the financial sense) whether she’s married or not. She could very well return to the Bad Boys she found so arousing and advises women ‘date’ and never rely on a man’s direct provisioning. As such she’s very comfortable in publicly revealing the ins and outs of post-sexual revolution hypergamy without so much as an afterthought.

While she publicly affirms the build model of Beta provisioning (under the guise of equalism) and expects “those guys will be awaiting you” this doesn’t hold true for a majority of women. Women with affluence enough, or a physical attractiveness sufficient to virtually ensure their future provisioning are much more comfortable with the build a better Beta model than women who find themselves more lacking in this assurance.

The more necessitous a woman finds herself in the sexual marketplace, the more likely she is to deny the mechanics of her own hypergamy.

A woman less confident in consolidating on her future long-term security (and / or cooperative parental investment) has a much more personal investment in keeping the truths of hypergamy a secret from men. As such, these women will be more predisposed to misdirecting the men becoming more aware of this truth and relying more on the selling model of Beta provisioning.

Needless to say this split between women comfortable in open hypergamy and women reliant upon secretive hypergamy is a point of conflict between the have’s and have not women in the sexual marketplace. The more men become aware of women’s hypergamy and strategic sexual pluralism, through women’s open embrace of it or the manosphere, the more pressure the ‘have not’ women will feel to also embrace that openness.

Gentlemen, do as I do and grab yourself a tuck of bourbon and throw some Keith Jarrett on the hi-fi. There’s cold, cold snow on the ground and I’m here to regale you with a story sure to convince you that there are no women immune to game, no exceptions to hypergamy. The final pixel in the matrix has blinked out of existence for me, and I see the truth. Not finally, not complete, but I’m a believer. I’m in the midst of the hypergamy chapters of The Rational Male and the light has dawned.

In late November I met a girl at my business whom I was immediately attracted to. We had a drink, made out, groped a bit, and she went home (3.5 hours away). A month later she came into town, and on Christmas Eve we cooked dinner at a place she was housesitting, spent two hours naked in a hot tub, and made love three times over the next ten hours, including, well, entrances and exits on Christmas morning. We saw each other again a couple days later, made love again, then she left town. In early January I was passing through her town, spent the night, and we again slept together three times in a ten hour span.

This girl (let’s call her Helen) is feminine, nurturing, sexy, and highly intelligent. She’s been through tougher times than any member of this board who wasn’t a combat military member. She’d make a killer mother, she’s kinky as hell, she’s emotionally vulnerable yet demure, and she’s submissive and kind. She’s an HB8 (at least by my reckoning) and has a slamming yoga body. I have tremendous respect for her and we have a great connection. The only downside is she’s 33 and is realizing that the wall is coming up.

Helen and I are constantly flirty by text, but I don’t really do long distance relationships, so my plan of action was to just hook up and hang out whenever we were in each other’s towns. However, this afternoon (this very afternoon!) we had a phone conversation in which she related that she couldn’t be flirty with me anymore and also couldn’t sleep with me should we see each other again. Not exactly LJBF, due to the fact that she sent me an underwear selfie not ten minutes after this conversation ended, but close enough. A last sexy gasp, but a rejection nonetheless. Why, gentle readers, did this kind soul state that our trysts had ended? Hypergamy.

You see, there was a gentleman (we’ll call him Chip) who met Helen last March. He was just out of a five year relationship, but he didn’t tell Helen that. He was a little damaged, but in that kind of way where Helen felt that sometimes they had a connection, and then at other times couldn’t figure out what Chip felt about her. In December, Helen told a dear family member to make sure that Helen never hung out with Chip again. It was unhealthy! She was hooked and couldn’t figure out why, and had to stay away from Chip. As of a couple weeks ago, however, Helen resumed hanging out with Chip. This, dear friends, is why Helen couldn’t be flirty or sexual with me anymore.

I talked to Helen about this man in depth. There certainly was a part of me that wanted to negotiate desire, to convince her to stay away from Chip, to continue our prior arrangement. But I knew this was a fool’s errand. So I took a deep breath and asked myself – “Self, do you really want to see the end of the Matrix? Do you want to dispel your belief in a ‘quality’ woman? If there ever was a quality woman, it is Helen. Let’s see if truly hypergamy is inescapable.”

I asked Helen various questions about her feelings towards Chip, revealing my knowledge of hypergamy and explaining each step of her own behavior to Helen as I did so. “See there, Helen? That’s push-pull. Tension. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it, but he’s driving you crazy and making you feel attracted towards him. One minute he’s accessible, the next he isn’t. He doesn’t return your texts on time, if at all. This creates the hook!” She agreed, but I could tell there was no changing her mind. For the sake of science, I pressed onward. “See how you’re basing all of this conversation on the potential of the relationship, Helen? You think you can save him from his damage! There’s nothing actual there, you’re just backwards rationalizing it to suit the hook he’s set in you.” Again, she agreed intellectually. “He’s demonstrating to you his evolutionary suitability by being unavailable, utilizing tension, and being completely non-needy. His life is the same whether you’re in or out of it, and it drives you crazy and creates attraction simultaneously!” Mental assent but hindbrain denial continued.

At the end of the conversation, she stopped me in her feminine adorable voice and said “We need to not talk about this anymore, it just seems so hopeless. I don’t want the world to be that way!” I told her that it was that way, but I do believe it’s possible for good men to harness those powers and create deeply satisfying, honest relationships. However, hypergamy is always the driving force, and to leave it unacknowledged is to invite disrespectful beta disaster or alpha cad heartbreak.

Helen, despite the truth being presented to her in the most obvious way possible, and mirrored in her every behavior towards Chip, couldn’t accept the reality of hypergamy. If she can’t resist or change her behavior based on reason and knowledge of the truth, no woman can. The lesson, kind readers, is not that you must be evil to get the girl. It’s that hypergamy is the deciding factor in attraction for EVERY SINGLE WOMAN. There are no exceptions, no “quality” girls. They all succumb. It’s our job to make them succumb to us.

After all this, she still sent me the dirty pic.

While it is of course vital for a man to internalize the various fundamental truths about the nature of women (hypergamy, solipsism, Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks, love based on opportunism, etc.), these fundaments need to become an ambient condition for you in your dealings. This understanding needs to become an internal – under the surface – part of your interactions with women.

Too many guys think that all of this requires some endless capacity to psychologically micromanage every aspect of their interactions, not just with the women they become (or potentially become) intimate with, but also women they work with (or for), their mothers, sisters or daughters. A common reason men initially reject the practice (not necessarily the concept) of Game is due to some imagined expectation that they’ll need to cognitively account for every variable a woman may or may not be subjecting him or herself to.

When you think of Game as some act you put on or some cognitive fencing match between you and a woman it’s easy to believe it’s just too exhausting. That’s when one of two things usually happen; Game-awareness either sinks in and becomes part of his personality, or he relaxes and/or abandons what he’s learned of Game.

As you think so shall you become.

Neo: “What’re you trying to say, that I can dodge bullets?”

Morpheus: “No Neo, what I’m saying is that when you’re ready you wont have to.”

There comes a point of internalization when your Game-awareness becomes part of who you are. There is no longer a need to mentally sort out what may or may not be going on with the women you’re interacting with. One of the first resistances I usually read from men when they first pick up on Plate Theory is that they could never manage more than a single woman’s interest at one time. Usually this is due to a fear of being caught by one or more women or thought of as a Player, but the premise is one of not having some imagined resources, time and energy to keep more than a single plate spinning at once.

Do you see where this is going?

It’s all about his effort, and his time management, and his capacity or talent for juggling all the responsibilities necessary to convince and qualify for a woman’s effort towards him. He and his concerns are not his mental point of origin and so don’t factor into his concept of what Game could be for him. It’s always energy and resources flowing out, rather than even having the temerity of thought to think that a woman’s effort should come to him.

When Game is internalized for a Man, he is his mental point of origin. Game critics like to frame this self-concern as sociopathy or Dark Triad, but these distractions from putting himself as his mental point of origin have the latent purpose of keeping him extending himself outward. For as much as it’s rewarded, no one wants to be thought of as an asshole, but Game-awareness doesn’t necessitate being a selfish prick, just putting oneself as their mental point of origin.

Noheroes’ story is a lesson in the various ways of coming to this internalized Game-awareness. I believe that Noheroes is making this transition through a lot of self-critical education. He had the foresight to keep Helen at a figurative arm’s distance. My guess is he knew her situation, being 33 and well on her SMV decline, and that single women during this phase are looking to lock down long-term commitment.

If I fault him for anything it was in his appeal to Helen’s reason when he pulled the cover off of the psychological and sociological underpinnings of what Chip actually meant to her and was (deliberate or not) doing with her. In doing so he laid all of his Game-aware cards on the table, and as has been discussed many times on RM, women may think they want the truth, but they never want full disclosure.

But perhaps (in the interests of science) this is what Noheroes intended. He essentially exposed Helen’s hypergamous (2nd chance Alpha Widow) behaviors and reasonings with the predictable results – women only want to play the game, they don’t want to know how it’s played.

For all of this, it’s actually Chip’s part that completes the Game circle. While Noheroes understands Game (and probably plays it well), and can explain it well enough, it’s Chip who’s effectively AMOG’d him without ever meeting him. I can’t say for certain that Chip isn’t self-aware of what he does, but my guess is he’s internalized Game to the point that it’s part of who he is. My guess is he’s a natural who’s had himself as his mental point of origin for so long that it’s just part of who he is – and being rewarded for it by the likes of Helen for so long that it’s naturally reinforced. Maybe he’s a natural sociopath as well, but this is immaterial to the internalizing of Game.

What were seeing here is a story of recursive Game – Noheroes even explains the process to Helen only to have her confirm her awareness of it, but still having a desire to participate in it.

The eminent Dr. J had a very insightful comment in The Brand of Independence. I’ll leave it to readers to read through the whole comment, but it was in reply to one of our resident feminist’s assertion that it “takes a village” to raise a child:

[…] I don’t view children as personal property that individuals (their parent-owners) have a “right” to do with whatever they see fit. A lot of the reason for opposition to discipline in schools is because parents believe that they can do whatever they want with their children, and that the education system should respect that.[…]

There is a strong contingent in the manosphere, and particularly MRAs, who’s primary goal is making society more aware of the inequitable redistribution of resources with regards to how the exchange unfairly affects men with respect to their parental investment and the influence they are allowed in participating in the lives of their (intended or unintended) children. Allegations of, and comparisons of feminism to Marxism or socialism are almost cliché amongst this set, and probably with good reason, however the constant repetition of such makes for an easy dismissal of the comparisons.

As most readers know, as a policy, I don’t delve into religion or politics on Rational Male unless an observable, gender related dynamic can be better explained in a religious or political context. I’ll probably be disappointing the feminism-is-socialism crowd (there’s no shortage of bloggers who’ll be happy to educate on this), but I must admit to a larger social dynamic I hadn’t considered before this comment exchange.

The Pre-Whipping

In finishing last week’s essay I wrote this:

The majority of men are varying degrees of Betas, pre-whipped by the feminine imperative for half a lifetime to eventually be the de facto cuckold for women’s sexual priorities at just the right time.

There are a few considerations we take as given in the manosphere. One of these has been the presumption that 80% of men, either by birth or by conditioning, are Beta. I actually think 80% is probably a bit conservative.

A lot of red pill mental effort revolves around defining just what makes a man Alpha, but when it comes to what makes a man Beta we tend to just accept that chump is a chump and we don’t want to be one. That’s really the whole point of unplugging; becoming aware of, and rejecting the influence the Feminine Imperative has had with regards to the direction of our lives. And that’s another basic of becoming Game-aware, we acknowledge a feminine-primary conditioning has had an undue influence not just on societal expectations of men, but literally how we think, and how we prioritize our thoughts, wants and goals to better accommodate a latent feminine purpose.

Since I began writing about Game-awareness and positive masculinity one of the most frequent frustration I have related to me is from a red pill reader with a friend who just wont be unplugged. They may know someone or be involved in a social set where just expressing observations of anything that might be interpreted as counter to this conditioning would risk their wrath. They see the behaviors, they hear the common and predictable reasonings their plugged in friends use within their unrealized feminine-primary context, and for all if it, it only confirms the extent of his own conditioning.

These are the men I call pre-whipped; men so thoroughly conditioned, men who’ve so internalized that conditioning, that they mentally prepare themselves for total surrender to the Feminine Imperative, that they already make the perfect Beta provider before they even meet the woman to whom they’ll make their sacrifice.

But why should there be a need for this conditioning? It hasn’t always been this way; only really within the past 60 or so years since the rise of feminism, the sexual revolution and the predominance of a feminine-primary social influence (fem-centrism, gynocentrism, et. al.)

It Takes a Village to Optimize Hypergamy

I hadn’t considered that in its efforts to eliminate masculine influence, fem-centrism would also seek to end men’s biological predispositions and personal reasons for parental investment with regard to raising and providing for his own genetic offspring. This is evidenced in the feminist belief that men would view their offspring as their ‘property’. Eliminate this male-owned preconception and replace it with the globalized “it takes a village to raise a child” model of parental investment, and not only is the masculine disenfranchised from the entire process, but it allows for an optimized condition of unfettered feminine hypergamy.

Since the latent purpose of feminism is optimizing hypergamy, it would stand to reason that promoting, reinforcing and affirming social and personal acceptance of essentially cuckolding a male provider into caring for her hypergamous breeding efforts (either proactively or retroactively) with better breeding (not necessarily provisioning) stock would need to be socialized into the majority of Beta men. Whether they sired them or not, the resulting children would be provided for, and the masses of conditioned Betas would be proud of themselves to do so thanks to a system of social rewards and positive affirmation. Those children would never be his property, irrespective of who’s genes they carried but rather they are wards of a system entirely devoted to the Feminine Imperative and hypergamous optimization.

Obviously failing in this, feminism needed social welfare programs to fill that provisioning gap, but it’s interesting to consider the feminine socialization efforts to make men more feminine-identifying from an early age so as to better prepare them to accept that cuckoldry and support role for women’s pluralistic sexual strategy (alpha fucks / beta bucks) when they reach adulthood.

Initially this feminine conditioning might be couched in an effort to raise boys to be more considerate of the female experience, but either by design or by nature the conditioning effort was more successful than just simple consideration. Complete internalization of that feminine identification seeped into every facet of what had formerly been the male experience.

A lot of blue pill adherents believe that red pill Game-aware men, of whatever manosphere stripe despise Beta man. Let me be clear here, although I can’t really speak for anyone else, I don’t despise the Beta. I don’t really believe any unplugged guy does, but that want to release a Beta from this system is often perceived as Beta-hate (for lack of a better term) by guys still trapped in the Matrix. That’s part of the feminine conditioning; to despise any Man attempting to make him aware of his conditioning.

Up until just today, other than a few tweets over the last two weeks, the heavy hitters of the manosphere seemed content to simply let Hugo Schwyzer self-immolate. Who can blame them, right? Vox had a quick hit just detailing the revelations of Hugo’s reputation / legitimacy death spiral. Advocatus Diaboli then did the manosphere the favor of highlighting Hugo’s post, post internet exit and twitter meltdown (which may still be ongoing, I’m not sure).

Needless to say Hugo endeared a lot of manosphere spite, but now, in light of all his self-righteous self-destruction and subsequent admissions of complete guilt and culpability in his career spanning, psuedo-feminist scam, we can finally dissect the corpse of Hugo’s grand production. Hugo was almost too easy a foil, too easy a mark for the manosphere. I forget who I read drop this quote, but Game recognizes Game, and for all of Hugo’s purported investment in feminist flag waving, a lot of guys in the ‘sphere saw his Game for what it was.

I’ll have to admit, when I first read the Real Porn Wiki Leaks of Hugo’s professional death throes I was ready to pile on. I need to thank Nick Krauser for talking me off the edge and killing a post I briefly published, ready to join the Hugo scrum, but as he commented, it was ‘off brand’ for me. That’s the temptation of going off half-cocked, most times there’s usually something deeper in the story than just the salacious parts. Sometimes a story needs to mature before you can grasp the significance of it, and Hugo didn’t disappoint.

There’s a lot of angles to Hugo’s destruction. In one sense he actually shared many of the experiences and frustration most men find their way to the manosphere to resolve. He was a Beta, but he was a Beta dedicated to the blue-pill – in fact he was so ego-invested he built his entire life around the feminine Matrix to the point that his career and livelihood depended upon it. However Hugo wasn’t one of the blue-pill careerists like the Dr. Phills and Dr. Drews, he sold himself as the next stage in feminized man’s evolution – Hugo was the feminized man.

At least this was the pathology he’d convinced himself of.

Pathology

If you’ve ever known a pathological liar, the primary characteristic of their psyche is an ability to convince themselves of the veracity of their own lies. “Repeat a lie enough and it becomes true”, Joseph Goebbels was inferring this in a social sense, but it’s also true on a personal, psychological level. Repeat the fantasy, replay the mental imaginings, review the desired, conditioned ,belief often enough, and the lie becomes the truth for you. This is the essence of pathology. The pathological personality literally creates its own reality and expects others (or coerces others) to fill the roles he defines for them to fit his narrative. Sometimes this isn’t such a bad thing; think of Steve Jobs defining his own reality, but more often it means the absolute destruction of that person’s identity when actual reality crushes their imagined reality.

Hugo repeated a lie often enough for himself to believe it, a handful of minor league academics to believe it, and broad swathes of the femosphere to believe it. Of course there’ll be the element that will say they knew it all along and he was always a charlatan, but Hugo’s reach into the mainstream, repeating his lie, was a message they could at least tolerate for their cause if not endorse wholesale. Thus, Hugo got a pass – he became the male representative of fem-culture and the happily willing tool of the feminine imperative.

I did promote others but I secretly wanted to be THE male feminist. 12:41 PM – 9 Aug 13 @hugoschwyzer

There’ll be no mercy for Hugo on this or any other manosphere blog. If there’s any consolation for Hugo it’s in his slitting his own net-persona’s throat and thus denying those in the manosphere the satisfaction of roasting him themselves. Even in his self-loathing twitter posts he still expects attention (like a woman) and consoling like a Beta child clutching at the femosphere’s apron strings.

The End Result

However, after all his singular sense of feminized purpose, Hugo got exactly what he wanted; he became, and in his personal destruction still is, themale feminist. He became the male representative of the gynosphere, the go-to guy, the man you sought out if you wanted to better identify with the feminine purpose. Hugo became, and is, the model of the man the feminine imperative would ultimately have anyman become – a man so thoroughly invested in the likeness it created for him that it would grant him exclusive access to its most powerful media voice (Jezebel, BlogHer, Xojane, The Atlantic). It’s their game, and Hugo was the only man the feminine imperative was comfortable in legitimizing; he was one of the select few men to be allowed to be take seriously.

Whenever you see one of these pathetic parodies of a man self-identifying as a ‘male feminist’ and holding some hand-scribbled placard with the words, “I need feminism because,…” understand that Hugo Schwyzer is the man the feminine imperative would ultimately have them become. The man at the end of that process, after 47 years of identifying with the feminine, after an utterly destroyed career based on obsessively denigrating his own gender, the end result is what Hugo is today.

I don’t have any sympathy for Hugo, nor do I have any pity for him. He’s only a year older than myself, so I imagine that he and I share a similar cultural upbringing and life experience. Obviously we differ in experience when it comes to waking up to the Matrix, but here’s a man who, not unlike myself, also had his run-ins with a BPD woman (if not more than one). Hugo, like most men, wanted to get laid, maybe worse than most men, so he built up a Game around identifying with them, only he took this identification to such an extreme that he became a woman, he embodied their expectations, but still retained the liabilities of being a man. Hugo is a living paradox and his destruction viscerally illustrates that even feminists won’t tolerate a perfected feminized man. They don’t want what they want.

For all of Hugo’s blue-pill, male feminism, he was still a man and prone to the desires men innately have.

How many blue-pill men have sought out the manosphere because their similar delusions simply never bore fruit with women, or they were burned by them? At some point Hugo was not all that unlike most guys seeking answers in the manosphere, but at some point he made his decision to remain firmly implanted in his blue-pill existence and cope with his maleness the best way he knew how – an extreme, life investment in what would become the identity crisis he’s experiencing today. Hugo is what is waiting for any man who thinks they can become a better fe-male – they become Gollum, corrupted parodies of their original form, but still accountable to their real nature.

Of all the scenes in the Matrix, Cypher’s 30 pieces of silver moment here is the one that requires the most suspension of disbelief. Granted, it’s the Matrix, so you’re going in with a lot of suspended disbelief, and I understand Cypher’s Judas moment is central to the movie’s plot, but for as cerebral and philosophically rich as the Matrix is, this scene begs a lot of questions.

First we have to consider how long Cypher’s been cut away from the Matrix – 9 years. His experience of awakening, or something like it, we can presume was much like Neo’s. Shock, disbelief, denial, depression and finally acceptance. The experience Cypher and Neo, and anyone else so unplugged, would somewhat follow a predictable path, and thus the people doing the unplugging have pre-established programs to help those awakened adjust to a ‘real’ life.

What Cypher has here is 9 years of experiencing the harsh reality of the ‘real’. Although he understands it, he wants to forget it. He wants the comfort and bliss that being unconscious and ignorant in the Matrix makes possible for him.

The disbelief we have to suspend here is that the automatons of the Matrix will actually honor their end of the bargain and graciously wipe away all of his memories of being in the real world, to say nothing of actually improving Cypher’s ‘life’, such as it is, once he’s blissfully oblivious of the ‘real’. One would think that after 9 years of watching the Matrix ‘code and understanding how that system works Cypher wouldn’t have been so naive as to think that the system wouldn’t simply kill him once he’d betrayed Morpheus to it.

Still, the want for an escape from harsh realities is certainly an aspect of the human condition. We all have them and for the most part they’re harmless distractions to ease what we can bear of the real world. However, depending upon the personality and the severity of the need to escape, we can find ourselves preferring the fantasy to the reality. This is what can make harmless distractions into compulsive obsessions. It’s easy to on pick MMO games as an illustration, but the ‘addiction’ element of them stems from a personality that prefers the fantasy to the reality of its conditions.

Artificial Joy

Cypher is one such individual. He’s been rejected by Trinity – one of the only two women on his ship – in favor of the (at the time contextual) Alpha of a better looking and less creepy Neo. He resents Trinity’s attraction to Neo and spends his off hours watching encoded Matrix porn (not only a Buffer, but also an escape) and has a direct line to the only alcohol on the ship (courtesy of Dozer). Both of these classic male escapes, and many more just like them, are the characteristic remedy intended to cope with a reality that borders on insufferable. It’s almost prescient that this movie was written and released well before the rise of ubiquitous internet porn.

“If you entirely removed men’s access to porn and booze from society the male suicide rate would increase tenfold.”

I’ve read this comment on a couple of manosphere blogs in the past, and it’s almost a truism when you consider the most visceral of Buffers men turn to in order to escape their realities. Whether or not that guy is lost in his blue pill mental jail cell or he feels destitute in the perceived hopelessness of a cruel, but real, red pill existence he’s unprepared for, a man will always look for his escapes – and usually he gravitates, and fixates upon the ones that best satisfy what he’s unable to actualize.

On second thought, maybe we don’t need to suspend any disbelief with Cypher. Once we understand that condition and situation, and the abject lack of an ability to adress it, can drive someone to desperation, to hopeless suicide, acts of violence, to fanciful absorbing escapes, etc., ‘real’ naive beliefs and willful intellectual negligences seem of small consequence by comparison.

Reinsertion

I’m using Cypher’s character here today thanks to an enlightening post Athol Kay dropped last week. I disagree with his assertion here that red pill men need their occasional blue pill escapisms, but really only in how he’s applying terms. Athol sites this same video and character to illustrate how men have a desire (need?) to regress back into their former ‘magical thinking’ in order to cope with the reality our red pill, our Game awareness, our new ability to make sense of, and confront, our conditioning and the mechanics of fem-centrism now demands of Men.

My main objection is conflating to blue pill ignorance as some sort of escape that a Man might artificially enjoy from time to time in order to balance the harsh, and admittedly cruel truths his new awareness brings to him.

The trouble is, a lot of the Red Pill approach to life assumes a near telepathic assumption of negative intentions in others. Is it often right? Sure it is. But it’s almost impossible to live happily if you are endlessly paranoid and jaded about the intentions of everyone around you. If every woman is a hot mess of whorish desire and nothing else but a lying cunt of a hamster justifying her Alpha male sperm seeking… well it gets tiring being on edge after a while. Likewise every man is a third wheel seeking an opportunity and plots behind your back, pumping you for information about your woman, seeking to make a run into the endzone the moment you blink too slowly.

I read versions of this breakdown from a lot of guys who resist the idea of a red pill or a Game awareness altogether when it’s first presented to them and they acknowledge the basics of it. I addressed this in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill and Bitter Misogynists, but the simple version is that what’s being outlined for red pill men seems too hopelessly nihilistic to actually be true. It sounds so paranoid and attention consuming that it can’t actually be.

From The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

Little Lies

The reason most men experience this initial hopelessness is because their only prior frame of reference for the way life works up until then has been that of a blue pill existence. It’s a very difficult aspect of killing the Beta and relearning how to exist in a red pill awareness – most men either reject it in wholesale denial or they turn paranoid and see the signs of the real intent or the underlying motivations for every action a woman or man presents them with as per Athol’s example.

The trouble this presents is one of switching a man’s paradigm from blue pill to red pill. Many transitioning guys tell me how impossible it is to “keep up the act” that they believe a red pill awareness requires of them. They believe so because their operative mindset, the direction they think will work best for them, are still based on the rules and mental framework of their former blue pill existence.

In the blue pill Matrix, everything was set for them, but with a red pill awareness comes the responsibility of doing things for themselves. They’re unprepared and cut away from a comforting system, but they don’t know what to do with that freedom. They understand that the blue pill is really a complex series of little lies meant to soften painful truths, and that they’d tell themselves more little lies to comfort themselves when those truths’ consequences hurt them, but now they know better. They have only themselves to blame for allowing the speeding, red pill train they knew was coming to flatten them. For one so unprepared it seems impossible to avoid.

Internalization

NEO: So what’re you trying to tell me, that I can dodge bullets?

MORPHEUS: No Neo, what I’m trying to tell you is that when you’re ready, you wont have to.

The problem lies in the assumption that Red Pill awareness is a consuming force in a Man’s life that demands his constant effort and vigilance to defend himself against.

Once this awareness is internalized and becomes a part of a Man’s personality there is no vigilance, just awareness. There is a subconscious understanding of the order of things from a red pill perspective, but that doesn’t mean I suspect the female bank teller I’m making a deposit with is ready to rob me blind the moment I turn to walk out the door.

Neil Strauss hinted at ‘social robots’ in The Game; guys who were nothing but Game all the time and were unable to make real emotional connections. I would argue just the opposite. The real danger inherent in Game and Red Pill awareness is a man using it to fulfill his former blue pill idealisms – that does require a constant effort.

A healthy red pill awareness requires not only a Man’s reassessment and recreation of himself, but also that he abandon his former blue pill paradigm and learn to live in a new, positive, red pill paradigm. It seems like a daunting task when you first come to terms with it, but ultimately your awareness becomes an internalized part of who you are. You can allow that to consume you with a paranoia rooted in your former blue pill frame, or you can learn to create hope in a new system – one that you not only have more control over, but one that requires you to assume that control.

Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Easier is telling yourself that you actually need the little lies the blue pill provides. Easier is is thinking the blue pill is the sugar that helps the medicine go down. Better is recreating a new, positively masculine, direction for yourself based on the awareness and the opportunity that the red pill provides and requires of you.

*Before I finish here I want to say that this post was in no way a ‘take down’ of Athol’s article. I have nothing but respect for the guy and count him as a valuable peer and colleague. His work with MMSL is a much needed resource in the manosphere, and I can’t say enough good things about his efforts. I simple disagree with his take on a need for blue pill illusion.

Over the Christmas break I had Dalrock and several SoSuave members alert me to a recent story about the firing of a dental assistant for “being too attractive”. I’d thought it was pretty laughable at first glance, but there’s a lot more going on in this situation than just what’s on the surface here. Naturally the fem-centric media starting point is the egregiousness of the all-male Iowa high court unanimously agreeing that a woman could be fired for something other than her job performance. It’s always interesting to observe the legal twistings when when the feminine imperative smacks into a law it hasn’t yet distorted to its own purposes (like right-to-work laws). I’m sure the case will be taken up the chain to even higher courts, but the operative will be the same – women don’t want to be beholden to general laws that conflict with the feminine imperative. Give it time and new definitions of what constitutes sexual discrimination, and you’ll see how fluidly the imperative achieves its ends.

Beyond the indignation prompting social fallout, there’s an interesting illustration in Game theory here. Melissa Nelson, a semi-attractive 32 year old dental assistant has her 10 year employment stint terminated by 53 year old Dentist, James Knight for representing too tempting a potential lover and too potential a threat to his marriage. This is where it gets interesting:

Nelson, 32, worked for Knight for 10 years, and he considered her a stellar worker. But in the final months of her employment, he complained that her tight clothing was distracting, once telling her that if his pants were bulging that was a sign her clothes were too revealing, according to the opinion.

Well, considering all she wore were standard issue medical scrubs it would appear that it didn’t take much to arouse the good dentist.

While her former boss claimed her clothes were so tight he couldn’t look at her without being aroused, Nelson said the only outfit she wore to work was standard scrubs worn by many nurses and assistants in dental offices.

Think about this for a moment, when Knight hired her 10 years ago she would’ve been 22 and he would’ve been 43. Looking at the more recent pictures of Nelson, I can see she’s followed the standard SMV curve, and while I wouldn’t rate her higher than maybe a cleaned up HB7, no doubt Knight was privy to watching her progress from her SMV peak at 22, to the inevitable two child, postpartum “chop it short” mommy-do at 32. After watching this and enduring the slow-burn, sexual pangs for a decade I suspect that Knight probably spent in inordinate amount of masturbatory energy on her mental image.

He also once allegedly remarked about her infrequent sex life by saying, “that’s like having a Lamborghini in the garage and never driving it.”

No doubt about, we’ve got a beta here. Blatant and obviously telegraphed sexual interest ham-fisttedly delivered as a compliment not only belies the beta, but no woman in human history has ever responded positively to it. In all my time counseling in the manosphere I’ve heard some derivative of this line constantly used by beta orbiters hoping that their ONEitis will get the message that she’s not being treated as well as she should be, and he’s uniquely qualified to appreciate her for her rarity. What chumps like Knight don’t get is that genuine desire and sexual impulse cannot be negotiated.

All a long-married beta like Knight is doing is falling back on his adolescent social skill set. This is the hallmark of a chump who’s never developed his Game beyond what it took to convince his wife to marry him.

Knight and Nelson — both married with children — started exchanging text messages, mostly about personal matters, such as their families. Knight’s wife, who also worked in the dental office, found out about the messages and demanded Nelson be fired. The Knights consulted with their pastor, who agreed that terminating Nelson was appropriate.

Once you see the pictures of Mrs. Knight all of this crystalizes for us.

Now we add in the element of Mrs. Knights suspicion and a healthy dose of parochial shame from their pastor (most likely at Mrs. Knights behest) and we see the good dentist moved to terminate “just an ordinary mom”. Here we see an all too common theme of the feminine imperative; using men to settle a score between women. My guess would be that had Mrs. Knight not discovered said texts, Nelson in all her ‘hotness’ would still be employed.

Knight is a very religious and moral individual, and he sincerely believed that firing Nelson would be best for all parties, he said.

I generally reserve my interpretations of the religious ramifications of Game to blogs like Dalrock’s, but at the risk of encouraging the moralist commenters on my blog, I have to draw attention to how the feminine imperative influences religious perceptions. This very religious and moral individual in all likelihood had been devising scenarios in his head about how he might engage in some kind of sexual tryst with Nelson through out her peak SMV years. He watched her progress through a relationship, watched her get married, gave her maternity leave when she had two kids, and still he pined. That pining only ended when Mrs. Knight demanded Nelson’s termination. Once again, biology trumps conviction, and did so for a decade, but once his back is to the wall he makes necessity a virtue.

Knight fired Nelson and gave her one month’s severance. He later told Nelson’s husband that he worried he was getting too personally attached and feared he would eventually try to start an affair with her.

When you compare James Knight to David Petreaus’ situation you can’t help but notice some surface level similarities. Both married to well-past the Wall wives and open (at least ideally) to getting with younger, better looking women. Their stories are an all too common theme in today’s SMP. Just based on what I see from the pictures, Knight strikes me as that archetypal mature guy who married young (well before fully realizing his true SMV), played by the rules, and probably only woke up to his SMV when a hot 22 year old made him realize his past potential. When a guys like this make sexual allusions comparing undriven Lamborghinis to the objects of their sexual desire, the real message is their own sexual dissatisfaction with their wives. Harboring that angst for 10 years while your ‘too hot to work with’ ONEitis is only infrequently getting banged is a special kind of beta hell.

When I wrote about the redefining of men’s mid-life awareness, Knight’s circumstance is the uglier side of that.

The truth about men’s mid-life crises isn’t about recapturing youth, it’s about finally understanding the trappings they’ve been sold into through their 20′s and 30′s and coming to terms with that often horrible truth. Some men do in fact buy the sports car, get the new hottie wife or act in some fashion that appears reckless and irresponsible. This isn’t due to infantilism, but rather new understanding of their own position as men. They’ve “lived responsibly” for so long and for so little appreciation that when that true realization is made they feel the need to move. They’ve become respected, put in the hours, the sacrifice, the censoring of their own views. They realize now that they’ve sold off true passions in favor of maintaining what others have told him was his responsibility – whether it was his choice or not. And all for what? A fat wife? A shrew? Maybe even a fantastic marriage and a wonderful family life, but also a nagging doubt about not seeing enough of the world by 40 because of it.

Now, before it gets said, I’m not suggesting that Knight have gone ahead and got after it with Nelson (if that was ever a consideration), but I do understand his predicament and the motivators behind it. If anything Knight serves as yet one more warning for men in realizing their SMV too late. The real tragedy here is that for a brief moment Knight was becoming aware of his (waning) SMV only to reinsert himself back into the Matrix with the aid of his wife and pastor. The real damage will be dealt in his new need for constant repression of this knowledge every time he bangs his wife, every time she nags, every time she gives him that doe-like thousand yard stare; he’ll understand the oldest manosphere proverb – once you know about the Matrix there is no going back.